His large, manicured hands, flat on the granite table, began to tremble with that spastic, involuntary tremor of an embezzler whose vault door has just been blown off its hinges by an artillery shell:
*tick-tick-tick-tick.*
“The… the Mercer Charter…?” Arthur gasped, his voice cracking into that thin, pathetic squeak:
“Harold… Harold swore to me that the widow was completely broken! That you were an ordinary, frail seventy-one-year-old woman who could be pushed off her land by an entitled boy on a motorcycle!”
“Eleanor was the master crypto-auditor who designed the analog failsafes with her late husband Robert twelve years ago, Arthur,” Vice Admiral David Mercer spoke from behind our shoulders.
His voice was sixty decibels of mountain quarry explosive:
“She audited your enterprise while Harold was bragging about his commercial plazas.”
“She protected this nation’s bedrock while your family was plotting to pave over the emergency flues of Conduit Ten.”
